Looters to collectors

Abstract

Abstract During the plunder of the Summer Palace in Beijing (commonly ‘Pekin’ in English until the 1890s) by the Anglo-French army in 1860, soldiers of the British forces acquired imperial objects. They repurposed these at home in Britain as commodities, trophies and decorative art. This essay takes a critical look at their activities as collecting – the purposeful selection and assembly of objects – and considers the tastes and priorities that were factors in the selection of treasures from the imperial estate; it then examines how, in the hands of soldiers, dealers and collectors, new meanings accrued to objects that were economic, political and aesthetic. This collecting history is told through case studies involving exhibitions, designed interiors and auctions at which objects from the Summer Palace figured, and situates these within the wider collecting and exhibition cultures of the later nineteenth century. The facts show that soldiers’ collections of Summer Palace material not only fed the art market, but also had a formative impact on the understanding and valuation of the objects in the marketplace.